‘I questioned why children were being encouraged to transition – and it cost me my dream career’

May 14, 2022 by Jill

by Charlotte Lytton, Telegraph:

James Esses had volunteered at Childline for five years but that counted for nothing when he shared concerns over their gender ideology…

James Esses turned 30 this week and has been doing a lot of reflecting. Last year, he was ejected from his psychotherapist training course – three years in – for openly discussing his fears that young children expressing discomfort in their bodies were being actively encouraged to transition; weeks later, Childline removed him from his volunteer role as a counsellor on the same grounds. After racking up more than 1,000 hours at the charity over the course of five years, attending one night a week after his work as a criminal barrister, he had been alarmed by such calls becoming more frequent; the callers younger. Of his subsequent battle against both institutions, he says “the pain and hurt is as raw as ever”.

Until he joined Childline in 2016, he’d never much engaged with the notion of gender dysphoria – feeling trapped in the wrong body. But the rise in those calls “set something off in my mind”, he remembers. Esses began reading books and academic papers on the subject, wanting to better understand how to help. “Once I began reading, I began to get extremely concerned with the medical pathways that we were putting very, very young children on,” he says. The children on the other end of the line “were so young that they weren’t even able to really verbalise to me what exactly it meant to be a man or a woman” – yet they told Esses they wanted to take puberty blockers and hormones, wear breast binders and have sex reassignment surgery.

Concerned, Esses raised the issue internally, perturbed too by the influence of Stonewall – the charity brought in by many organisations in the name of equality – whose posters in counselling rooms suggested “an ideological message around gender”, and Childline’s website, where he describes the page on gender identity as a “roadmap towards medical transitioning”. It also features a video from individuals who have transitioned, who are “basically selling it to young people… [with] no mention of de-transitioners and the significant risks and potential permanent scars that might come from those who regret [it]”.

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